Paradise vet, tech recall trip to help Nepalese counterparts

PARADISE — Street dogs are as common in Nepal as squirrels are in Paradise, according to a local veterinarian and her technician.

During a volunteer effort to help Nepalese veterinarians learn modern treatments and techniques, Dr. Valerie Caruso and vet technician Rebecca Manninen from Companions Animal Hospital in Paradise spent 12 days across the world with Canadian and American veterinarians.

"There is a veterinarian there, and her husband is a diplomat for the USA, so she was able to arrange for us — if we could make our way there — to stay at their home and work with the local veterinarians," Caruso said.

During their trip, Manninen and Caruso learned to appreciate the modern advancements available to American vets.

"Their veterinarians don't get any training in vet school on small animal medicine and surgery, so the ones that are working on the dogs and cats are all self-taught, and their equipment is probably how we were 50 years ago," Caruso said.

In addition to the lack of training in small animal medicine, Nepal doesn't have a lab for testing animal samples, so all of the samples are sent to human labs. They added that there are no animal-specific medicines available there either.

"We had a dog with an ear infection, but there is no ear medication there," Caruso said. "We had our iPhones, and we have veterinarian apps on there, so we were able to figure out the different percentages of antibiotics. We made it up as we went, and it worked."

Manninen said it was an adventure being there, because she and Dr. Caruso were constantly having to improvise on their treatment practices.

"It was kind of like being MacGyver the entire time, because our normal ways of doing things weren't feasible because we didn't have our normal stuff, so we had to try and think outside the box," Manninen said.

In addition to helping train the veterinarians there, the volunteers helped spay and neuter street dogs.

"There are street dogs there and dogs everywhere, and they are very well-behaved, because if they weren't, they wouldn't be tolerated," Caruso said. "About every 40 or 50 feet there is a dog curled up just sleeping."

One area in Nepal didn't feel the street dogs were tolerable because of their constant barking, so the chamber of commerce allegedly began to poison the dogs with strychnine, Caruso said.

"The problem is that it got not only the street dogs, but it got people's pets, because people put their own pets outside at night as guard dogs," she said. "They didn't warn anybody to keep their dogs in, and that kind of thing would never happen here."

She added that at the end of their trip, the volunteers got in contact with one of the chamber members who said that they would work with a veterinarian to find an alternative way of controlling the barking.

Manninen said because of the numbers of street dogs, it is difficult to treat them all and try to stop them all from barking.

"It is like in the town of Paradise, you would have the equivalent of 400 to 500 dogs," she said. "It is really hard to manage that, and that is why their poisoning method was the simplest solution for them. It was extremely unethical, in our opinion."

In the group that went with Manninen and Caruso to Nepal was a vet school student, a vet from New York and a vet from Canada.

"The New York veterinarian was amazing because she was deaf," Manninen said. "She couldn't hear a dog's heart, but she would put her hands and her wrists on the dog's chest to feel the heart beating. She could pick up murmurs better than we could."

The women said they enjoyed helping the animals, and would like to go back to help the Nepalese veterinarians again one day.